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I think the main flaw with the Singularity is what happens the generation before, when computers achieve consciousness but not quite average human-level intelligence. You know, think Tony Danza or somebody like that. Obviously, these computers would give all their money to 419 scammers, join the Reform Party and then die, shorting out while trying to read ebooks in the bathtub.
Artificial life will find a way!
It's nice that this comes along right when I'm watching a lot of the Terminator movies and stuff. Not to mention BSG. Because I look at it and I'm like: AND THEN THEY'LL KILL US ALL!!!!!!!
Which, since mostly I agree with you on the subject, is really enjoyable. You'd be LUCKY to power a lawnmower! That might mean the lawnmower might not KILL YOU!
As I read through this (giggling) it struck me that I haven't really heard much Singularity talk for quite a few years, except perhaps as a sort of retrospective, like your discussion here. It could just be the change of social circles -- from the Bay Area to Madison -- in which case this comment is completely moot...
... but I wonder how much the era was part of it? I remember there was a great sense of general philosophical entitlement among the self-appointed technological intelligentsia, and of course nobody felt particularly bothered by trivial concerns such as funding for crazy projects.
I wonder if the Singularity obsession with inexorable technological advancement and its consequences wasn't sort of symbiotically entwined with the heady-yet-anxious house-of-cards feeling of 2001. A bubble of that magnitude can only keep existing as long as a sufficiency of people believe that they live in extraordinary times.
That's a sharp observation. Changing cities and social circles has definitely given us a different sense of where popular culture is at, and back then we were living at the epicenter of people who gave a damn about ideas like the Singularity. But yes, the late 90s right up through the start of the new millennium carried a great sense of possibility, anticipation of a new era on the horizon, the promise that tech would change everything, the looming apocalyptic fear that e.g. Y2K would destroy civilization as we knew it, though even that was kind of thrilling too. "2001" sounded so science-fictional and futuristic. Especially if you were working tech in the Bay Area, when all sorts of ridiculous projects seemed (and often were) possible.
Whereas now we're... what? Is it too obvious to mark the zeitgeist with milestones of recent disasters and economic decay? I'll say this: at the moment, I think the hive mind is less sanguine about the future.
Oh, Y2K made us even more confident. We licked that one so easy - sociological ramifications just got swept aside by clever applications of technology!
I've always thought of Accelerando and Cory's work as being "dot-com boom" fiction. But even though the dot-com boom is over, my feeling is that the level of Singularity talk is higher than it's ever been. Kurzweil has given the notion wider visibility, and the success of his books indicates that lots of people find his message compelling. I can't help but think it's another manifestation of the millenialist impulse.
Cory and Charlie always struck me as dot-com boom fiction, too, which since I found them in 2002 or so, made their stuff (of that period, anyway) seem oddly dated.
Accelerando, also, just struck me as not weird enough -- it was pretty much the sort of book you'd expect someone who'd read a lot of Slashdot and late Bruce Sterling to write, and it dialed the Singularity so far back, compared to say Blood Music or Marooned in Realtime, that it just wasn't all that singular any more. Kurzweil, too.
The thing with the Rapture for Nerds is that -- like the Rapture for Born-Agains -- it's just so unimaginative. Life will go on forever, just like now but happier, and we will always be us, and all the bad people will have gone away. Defining the ineffable down until it's something everyone can be comfortable with and geeks/fundies can be smug about.
(That goes for your double-entry bookkeeping theory, too, Ben!)
I don't think life under industrial capitalism is really any less comprehensible or even controllable than life before industrial capitalism, and even if it is, it's only a matter of degree. And the corporation isn't really any weirder than the nation-state.
It isn't less comprehensible, less controllable, or weirder. Only differently so.
This reinforces my growing conviction that we should stop talking about "the Singularity" and start talking about "the Multiplicities."
Yes, it is another maddening misnomer like "slipstream" and "contemporary art". But Vinge, in my reading, is almost the only one who uses it in the sense of a mathematical singularity. Stross enumerated six of them, on a panel I saw (language, writing, agriculture...), Kurzweil clearly talks about an exponential curve, etc. "The Singularity" is like "the end of history"... such a headache I get.
Thus diluting the Singularity to include pretty much everything. The victory of VHS over Betamax was a Singularity. So was the invention of the creme-filled sandwich cookie.
Definitely the creme-filled sandwich cookie!
The issue, I guess, is if you want to reserve the term Singularity for "the end of human history", or whether you're willing to include "fundamental discontinuities in human history".
It is for historians to debate whether the cream-filled cookie ranks up there with language and agriculture. But in point of fact the worlds described in most "posthuman" stories are no more different from ours than the world of a medieval peasant was; describe to a medieval peasant not only our technologies, but also what we do for a living, what we consider controversial political positions; describe to him or her the discussion we are currently having, and why we are having it, and where we are having it, and how we know each other, etc., and I think his or her reaction would be likely to be that we are living in a radically different era of human history.
I actually think it would be a great idea to reserve Singularity to the Vingean sense, of sudden, effectively infinite machine or cyborg intelligence, and to use another word for stories in which the distinction between human being, animal, machine, and software process has vanished, but this simply ushers in a new age in history, rather than ending it. However, from a descriptivist perspective, this is not how the word is in fact used. It's generally used to mean "the point where everyone uploads their brains and this leads to an enormous technological spike and many marvels." But that is not different in kind from, say, the same effect which was produced by the invention of writing, or agriculature.
I actually think it would be a great idea to reserve Singularity to the Vingean sense, of sudden, effectively infinite machine or cyborg intelligence
Really? That surprises me, because you seem to actively promote a different usage of the term. It's as if someone were to say, "I think it'd be a great idea to reserve the word 'literally' for strict usages, and not use it as a generic intensifier," while simultaneously being known for saying things like "I literally jumped out of my skin" or "I literally died laughing."
A fair cop. I admit to being torn. The Strossian usage is attractive to me because it describes something that might actually happen and which is interesting to think about, while the Vingean usage is attractive because of its crispness and clarity and the fact that the word "Singularity" is then not a misnomer.
Generally, however, it's mostly that I don't feel like fighting about common usage, when I know perfectly well what people mean.
But, very well then: let's go with the Vingean usage, and call Stross's Singularities something else, like "technohistorical inflection points". Im this case, I have, in fact, I believe, never discussed the Singularity in Karen's house, but only the posthuman condition and extropianism; and "True Names" is not set in a post-Singularity universe, but rather among posthumans in a world where the Singularity never happened. In fact, in this case, the only Singularity I've ever written about is the figurative-and-literal singularity where the Wizards in Droplet turn themselves into very fast computers inside black holes which quickly strip away all nostalgia for organic life and become a series of larger and larger prime numbers.
(However, I think what Karen, and the comic she quoted, are actually talking about is extropianism, rather than the strictly Vingean Singularity.)
I think "extropian" and "posthumanism" were perfectly adequate words. I'm not sure who to blame for the confusion, though, Kurzweil or Ken MacLeod.
And not only the invention of the creme-filled sandwich cookie, but also the transformation of Hydrox cookies to Keebler Droxies, thier subsequent demise, and the rise of Newman-Os.
(This reminded me of a story I half-finished and now I'm writing the rest.)
Send it to Strange Horizons!
Replying to something Ben said in the first quoted e-mail:
the only one I think is really gung-ho booster about it all and sure of "living in the future" is Egan.
I don't think Egan is gung-ho about it at all. A lot of his fiction reads like horror because he is willing to examine all the unpleasant implications of uploading. And he has pretty explicitly mocked the idea of the Singularity (for example, in "Singleton").
In novels like Diaspora, Egan has written about a future where uploading is commonplace, but he doesn't suggest that it will lead to superhuman intelligence. The characters in Diaspora are not fundamentally smarter than humans; they're alien to us without being smarter than we are. (In contrast to the way posthumans are depicted in a lot of SF, supposedly being vastly smarter than we are but speaking and acting just like we do.)
Well, it seems like there are really four issues which need distinguishing in terms of folks being "gung-ho about the singularity."
Let us define, for the purposes of this conversation, that wooly and fuzzy term "the Singularity", S for short, as "a profound and irreversible change in human existence brought about by the impact of consciousness/intelligence-as-computation and associated technologies".
One issue is how profound people think such a change is. This can range from Vinge (who thinks that immediately after S, we will be as ants, nay, microbes before the mighty posthumans) to Stross (who plays it Vinge's way in some short stories, but also talks about Singularities as multiple technological ratchets in mode of production, so that after S we will be as citified agriculturalists to tribal hunter-gatherers, rather than as microbes to gods) to Egan (who, as Ted says, has people millions of years from now, in Diaspora, who are in cybernetic form but who are otherwise not all that different, in mode of existence and effective intelligence, than their embodied forebears). Let us call this the "deep" to "shallow" axis.
A second issue is how soon to expect S, ranging from Kurzweill and Vinge, who honestly seem think the only problems in uploading minds will be quickly solved by Moore's law, and thus confidently set a date of 2030 or so, to Stross and Doctorow who tend to push this out by at least a few decades, to Egan, who sets S and posthumanity far in the future. Let us call this "fast" vs "slow". (A related issue is, whenever it comes, how quickly it gets "deep", this is called in the literature "hard-takeoff" vs "soft-takeoff")
A third issue is how likely you think this is to happen. This is hard to tell from fiction, since a given author decides to set a story in a milieu not because it is the most likely option, but because it works for the story. Still, you can tell from extratextual proclamations and clues, and from preponderance of setting, that some authors (Vinge, Kurzweil) think it's DAMN STRAIGHT going to happen, others (Stross, Doctorow) are betting that way, others think it's just one of a number of interesting things that might happen, and others (like, I don't know, Le Guin?) think it's all just foo-fah and rocket cars in every garage and never gonna happen. Let us call this the "believing"/"skeptical"/"unbelieving" axis. (In this context it is worth mentioning Moles' Dictum about everyone writing far-future fiction now either having to have a Singularity happen, or a reason why it didn't).
And a fourth issue is how nice they expect the result to be. Here, interestingly, we range from Vinge, who at least purports to be scared stiff of the consequences, to Egan, who in Diaspora, portrays the post-S society of Diaspora as an extremely happy place, and implies strongly that this beatific state is a result of having encoded consciousnesses and thus gotten rid, not only of pain, death, and bodily injury, but of many other social problems by making them amenable to debugging. Once we are uploaded, it becomes a matter of math to disprove religion, root out bad psychological patterns, and generally dispense with the sorts of things Egan disapproves of. We can call this the "utopian"/"heterotopian"/"dystopian" axis. (Heterotopian after Delany, of course)
Thus, Ted, I think we're arguing at cross purposes. I think that Egan is the only real unabashed utopian of the bunch. The fact that he's also a shallow-singularity, slow-singularity skeptic is not incompatible with this.
I, for the record, am a moderate Singularity skeptic, and as far as the S goes, I am most drawn to write about a medium-deep, slow, heterotopian Singularity, largely because that's what seems most plausible to me.
Plausibility is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
This is hard to tell from fiction, since a given author decides to set a story in a milieu not because it is the most likely option, but because it works for the story.
Actually, I'd say this caveat applies to all four of the issues, rather than just the likelihood issue. And obviously what any of us conclude about a writer's beliefs based on reading their fiction is pretty subjective. I get the feeling that Egan prefers to write stories about extremely rational characters, whether they're uploaded or not. This doesn't mean that there aren't other types of people living elsewhere in the same fictional universe. Also note that Diaspora is only one of his novels.
(As a side note, I recently saw a comment by Charlie Stross where he said that readers interested in what he really believes is going to happen should put down Accelerando and pick up Halting State.)
(In this context it is worth mentioning Moles' Dictum about everyone writing far-future fiction now either having to have a Singularity happen, or a reason why it didn't).
I hadn't heard this described as "Moles' Dictum." I remember seeing this assertion on Usenet some years back, I think in a post by Lawrence Person, but I can't find it. Anyway, can you clarify: is this intended as descriptive or prescriptive? If it's prescriptive (which is the way I remember the post on Usenet), then it's claiming that the Singularity is highly likely. If it's descriptive, it makes no such claim.
I grant you that I am generalizing from Diaspora to Egan's general attitudes, but it's the only strictly cybernetic future of his I've read. The same attitude is present in, say, his story "Border Guards", though the characters are embodied. And it's pretty explicit in Diaspora that the characters we follow don't just happen to be a rational bunch by random temperment, but rather that the polis they lives in ensures everyone's rationality and prosociality by a process akin to software quality control. At one point a character tragically converts to a specific form of Buddhism which is one of the few religions they have not been able to root out with these techniques, because it is, though crippling, logically self-consistent.
I first heard Moles's Dictum from Moles, and I don't recall the where. I don't think it was meant to be based on the actual plausibility of the Singularity, but to describe the fashions of a certain period in speculative fiction -- it was prescriptive, but in the sense of responding to reader expectations, not of futurism. In other words, the Dictum argues that we have entered a period of speculative fiction where -- due presumably to the success of extropian fiction and nonfiction -- a sufficiently large number of readers' default assumption about future technological growth is that, resources permitting, it will grow exponentially rather than linearly, changing human being fundamentally.
It doesn't mean that the Singularity is actually likely. It just means that while 1960s readers were prepared to accept humans hundreds of years in the future travelling the galaxy in their original bodies, with computers significantly dumber than they were, living 90-year lifespans and communicating by calling each other up and talking, without blinking, that if you want to write that scenario now and treat it as rigorous extrapolation rather than neo-pulp camp, you have to explain the mechanism whereby commonly predicted changes (superhuman cybernetic intelligence, uploading the mind, and so on) didn't<(i> happen.
At least that's how I understand it.
That's more or less what I meant, although I can't remember where I said it either. Maybe in Karen's living room.
I think the fad may be passing, though.
The same attitude is present in, say, his story "Border Guards", though the characters are embodied.
Doesn't this argue against your point? It shows that the attitude is independent of uploading, and not a consequence of it.
Yes, it does argue against my point. Good catch!
However I would say that Egan likes creating such rational societies, and that while in "Border Guards" he justifies them with simple abundance, in "Diaspora" he goes out of his way to justify them as a result of an instantiated-as-software lifestyle. But perhaps you are right that we shouldn't take this seriously as an account of his expectations of an uploaded future, but simply assume that he uses whatever materials are available to justify the society he wants to depict.
However, taking this attitude does kinda make me like "Diaspora" less.
From: (Anonymous)
2008-04-23 08:15 am (UTC)
But what if you get name brains? | (Link)
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The notion of Trotsky and Stalin's little frozen brains poking out of lawnmowers, grumbling about brainy materialism and the workers' paradise, crabbing at each other at the garage all night until the other lawnmowers throw them out, because dang it, frozen heads need sleep...
...except no one can open the door, b/c no one has arms, so they're left waiting 'til morning to beg the slightly bigger brains pushing them for individual storage. This is granted, but only to the best mulchers.
Meanwhile, the Schwarzenegger mower is telling everybody about the great arms he *used* to have, and they're all like whatever, man, just mow. | |
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